Practitioners Report Skill Gains From Safe & Together Coaching

Caseworkers across Australia’s child protection and family violence systems already talk with fathers who use violence—but that work has rarely been documented, standardised, or built on evidence. The Invisible Practices project, funded by Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS), spent 2017–18 building structured Safe & Together™ Model skills into that work through senior-practitioner Communities of Practice in New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, and Western Australia, coached by consultants from the Safe & Together Institute.

Across the four states, practitioners reported a modest overall increase in how often they applied five core Safe & Together skills, with the clearest gains in two areas: feeling more supported by their agency to focus directly on the parent causing harm, and doing a better job balancing attention across the whole family rather than the mother alone. Practitioners were candid that their early self-ratings had overestimated what they actually knew—a gap that only became clear once they’d done the work.

The project’s clearest lesson was that skill-building alone wasn’t enough: practitioners said sustained change required senior management support, including practical safeguards like ensuring two workers were available for higher-risk visits, and organisational recognition that psychological safety, not just physical safety, was at stake when engaging perpetrators directly.